<p>[The</a> 50 Best Colleges & Universities 2011-2012 Top School Rankings](<a href=“http://www.thebestcolleges.org/rankings/top-50/]The”>http://www.thebestcolleges.org/rankings/top-50/) </p>
<p>Not a bad showing for Williams (ahead of Amherst, Stanford, Yale, Penn etc.).</p>
<p>It’s a very silly rubric that has Columbia down at #46 because of the high cost of living in NYC.</p>
<p>If you look at their rubric, academics play only 20% for something like that.</p>
<p>We could devise a ranking scheme of the most people who attend with blonde/blond hair and probably end up with the University of Minnesota.</p>
<p>My S is Williams '11, and he loved the school, but not because of rankings.</p>
<p>One of the major criteria: The “quality of location in terms of the locale’s educated population”? Huh? I went to Yale. New Haven is a pit-hole-- didn’t make a tinker’s dam to my education-- in fact, it made campus life vibrant-- same goes for being in a rural community such as the Purple Valley. So being in a hip college town gives points even if the college itself is crap (but it has to be a cheap hip college town because cost of living (not tuition/room & board but the locale’s cost of living for people NOT IN COLLEGE) matters to them. Toss this survey in the bin.</p>
<p>I also question some of the numbers. is it really possible that the 75%ile for Harvard is a 2390? That is saying 25% of a given class scored a perfect 2400? Maybe if that’s calculated using super-scoring? If so, I guess applicants should not think their 790s are good enough.</p>
<p>^ Harvard’s scores are really that high… I know, it’s nuts, Haha.</p>
<p>Superscoring is used by all the schools that report their SAT scores. USNWR uses superscored results.</p>
<p>no they’re not…
I can almost guarantee that Harvard’s 75th percentile is not a 2390. You cant assume because the 75 percentile of each individual subject is 800,800,790 that all the people who scored above the the 75th percentile in one section would score above the 75 percentile in the other 2 sections…</p>
<p>Harvard Incoming Class Stats from USNWR: </p>
<p>Critical Reading 25th-75th percentile: 690-800</p>
<p>Math 25th-75th percentile: 700-790</p>
<p>Writing 25th-75th percentile: 700-800</p>
<p>I’m not a math person, but I think that works out to 2390. I guess it’s good that you didn’t guarantee it, because that would be so embarrassing.</p>
<p>That’s not the same thing though. You cant say that the same people are all scoring at the high end and just add the three scores together. Or you shouldn’t. That just doesn’t make sense statistically.</p>
<p>Hey-- who cares? There are really really really high… 2350 2390-- does it make a difference? Harvard’s SATs are high. Enough.</p>
<p>The people I know at Harvard did not get anywhere near 2390. And I know kids rejected at Dartmouth and Columbia who were accepted at Harvard.</p>
<p>And there are kids who didn’t break 2300, too, and some who didn’t break 2200. Harvard looks for a particular kind of student with very strong leadership skills.</p>
<p>Williams could fill their class with higher scorers than it does with its applications, but it also has a particular student in mind. “Intellectual vitality” is important in a Williams education.</p>
<p>Numbers are not what gets kids into schools, even if they are the appetizer.</p>
<p>I think it does matter. It’s not really about Harvard, it’s about making up statistics, for any college. Adding up the three sections is bad math, at either end. Unless a school publishes actual combined score data, I think the category should be left blank. It’s just really lazy math.</p>
<p>You can’t add up the 75th percentile of each section and say that’s Harvard’s 75th percentile total score. Because it’s not necessarily true that students who score an 800 in critical reading scored a 790 in mathematics and 800 in writing.</p>